Writing the Echoes

A Preface: I wrote this "writer as reader" review of Joan Didion's work for a Massey University Creative Nonfiction assignment. If you are at all interested in writing nonficion; be it blogging, travel writing, journalism or essays of any kind, I cannot recommend this paper enough. I have never been more stretched, challenged, inspired, encouraged or taken more enjoyment from a course, and I believe that this brief training will be useful for the rest of my life. Understanding a little about writing, and writing fairly fluently are not great hurdles, but in the days of text speak and auto-correct, I find myself cringing more often than not at the general misuse of language (not that I am perfect) and hope to stabilise my own prose so that when it comes to educating others in these matters, I am confident in my own knowledge and ability. Perhaps I want to change the cliche to "those who can do, teach." I don't know. What I do know is that from time to time, I like to write things down and occasionally I like to share what I write, and you will find out why in the essay below.

Why Joan Didion would call her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem is of great coincidental interest. Sometimes, in my life at least, there are a series of moments that individually seem ordinary, but when reaching into time and pulling them out and opening my hand to see what I’ve caught, I realise they are not ordinary at all, but some fantastical collision of chances which bond together and form a secret treasure. This is how I feel about Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I read Yeats for the first time this year and wrote an exam about his apocalyptic prophecy. I feared “The Second Coming”. I was terrified by the “blood-dimmed tide” and the “gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” and I was afraid that someone could have such a vision.
                That I was new to Didion and knew to what she was referring was like meeting a kindred spirit for the first time, or seeing someone wearing the same shoes; I felt that there was an invisible link between her and I; a comforting sense that I was not alone in the world. And this is what Didion does. She takes a moment, an idea, an observation, and turns it into an exploration that is intimate while still enigmatic, inviting me to reflect on my own uncertainties and putting words to the thoughts and feelings that I can’t make sense of. In “On Keeping a Notebook” she writes:

I was on Fire Island when I first made that sauerkraut, and it was raining, and we drank a lot of bourbon and ate the sauerkraut and went to bed at ten, and I listened to the rain and the Atlantic and felt safe.

The eloquently stated facts make me think of a certain New Year’s Eve with my father, mother and brother; we were in Kinloch near Glenorchy at the tip of Lake Wakatipu and we ate crackers and cheese and dip and drank Jagermeister. Reading her writing is like experiencing that moment all over again, and although it is a completely different set of circumstances, the feeling I get is enough to bring back my own memories.

The truth is, I took this paper to fulfil a requirement, and another truth is, I took it to fulfil my curiosity: how can “creative” and “nonfiction” coexist in writing? Is it possible that I, who have always enjoyed writing short snippets about my uneventful life, should learn some skill and maybe even feel that people might want to read what I have to say? Didion tells me that “the impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily…” and I know it. There are times when I wake up with an idea; and when I say wake up I mean it is the early morning, too early to be getting out of bed, when the thoughts that had been marinating in my mind while I slept suddenly burst to the fore; I reach beside me for my phone, squint my eyes, fumble a sentence or two into my note app and fall immediately back to sleep as if I had just been up doing something exhausting for ten hours. Somehow Didion knows who I am because I am she; her stories and impulses are mine.
                I want to write, I want to enjoy writing and I want to be good at it. I don’t want to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars or anything; I just want to create a little corner in the world that is mine that some other people might stumble upon and find an echo of their own thoughts or opinions or memories. I want to write because I want to rearrange the furniture in my head. I want to throw away the rubbish, tidy up the drawers, put things away and admire everything in its place. Then I want to take that one tidy room, and articulate it on a computer screen. Carl Klaus describes it as “the literature of interiority.” Essays are, essentially, consciousness that has been worked over using “sequence, syntax, and wording of those memories and thoughts.” And Didion’s essays are no different. She wants to write so she can interpret the world around her; take peripheral images like “the woman in the dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper” and remember herself in the “unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress”.
                “Why I Write” speaks of Didion’s need to make sense of the world around her, particularly in the quintessential line, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”  She speaks of “images that shimmer around the edges,” which I don’t particularly understand, but she later explains the “pictures in the mind” as sort of imaginings which germinate and become clearer as they are written into being using the “infinite power” of grammar.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear…To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed…The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind.

That is good advice. Perhaps it is a matter of realising what the picture in my mind is. What picture do I want to interpret, to convey to the reader? How can I arrange my words so they enthral me, where I am so overwhelmed by the grammar on the page that it speaks directly to the image in my mind and I begin to understand, even know, what it all means, and once I’ve reached that place, to share my revelation with the world at large so they too, can understand the picture in their heads? Didion says her “most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper,” and I can see it. Reading her work is captivating, and impossible to rearrange as Eula Biss knows: “I destroyed Didion’s syntax as I rewrote her essay, and as the essay became mine, it felt less true, not more so.”
                “Why I Write” and “On Keeping a Notebook” move between ideas and paragraphs so smoothly, I am taken into the wake of a rower slicing through a silent glass lake and I don’t even notice the transition, weightlessly floating behind Didion’s pull. From “Why I Write[‘s]” opening lines about bullying to: “I stole;” a description of a lack of intellectual thought to: “In short I tried to think. I failed,” each section is opened by an idea from its predecessor. I like this method of linking ideas, the repetition and reiteration; such a constant driving forward that I can’t help but be sucked into the quest for understanding. Klaus describes it as:

A mind in the self-absorbed process of trying to find what will suffice, seeking the grail of insight.

…the notebook and why she keeps it haunt her from start to finish – haunt her so much that she never digresses from that overriding question, relentlessly scouring her notes in search of an answer.

The immediacy of her meditation makes it seem as if I’m listening in on something like an interior dialogue, a conversation between Didion and herself. A probing dialogue that gradually leads to a climactic series of insights…

I see now that Didion has a focus that I do not, that she will row and row and row until the time comes when the question unravelled, the answer found, she can put the image away, put her mind at ease (or at least resolve the shimmer) and perhaps move on. She says “I was in this airport only once, on a plane to Bogota that stopped for an hour to refuel, but the way it looked that morning remained superimposed on everything I saw until the day I finished A Book of Common Prayer.” The image that remained and tainted every other picture, the image that “shimmered,” why was it there? So she could “remember what it was to be me.”
                “On Keeping a Notebook” uses the recurring phrase, “it all comes back.” The strange, short, offhand notes that have no way of reminding the author of their context somehow afford Didion enough of the picture to spark recognition and put the puzzle together. The captured image never seems to be about something as prosaic as the information in the note – it is really about a nebulous concept, an echo of a shimmer, which “all comes back.” Perhaps the confusion and uncertainty I’ve felt will come back to me, perhaps I will use those echoes and become a great and popular writer, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a legacy to eclipse even Didion. Probably not, but perhaps I will publish a small thing that answers my own questions while coincidentally answering someone else’s and forming secret treasures all around the world.